Today in 2006, the first tweet was posted.
Nick Bilton in Hatching Twitter:
On March 21, 2006, at 11:50 A.M., Jack [Dorsey] twitted, “just setting up my twttr” … it all started to come together. Jack’s concept of people sharing their status updates; Ev [Williams]’s and Biz [Stone]’s suggestion to make updates flowed into a stream, similar to Blogger; Noah [Glass] adding timestamps, coming up with the name, and verbalizing how to humanize status by “connecting” people; and finally, friendships and the idea of sharing with groups that had percolated with Odeo and all the people who had worked there… [Later that evening] they were like a bunch of children at a sleepover wishing each other good night. Like a group of friends talking about what they had done that evening, they all sat separately, together, having a conversation. Tweeting.
In the years that follow, sharing status updates has transformed into a highly visible measurement of popularity, with the number of twitter followers reflecting one’s social status, influence, celebrity. For many Twitter users, it has become a source of entertainment, not as passive consumers of someone else’s creative output (as when they watched TV or read a newspaper), but as active players, creators, fully engaged producers.
As happened with traditional media, the long-time exclusive domain of reporters and broadcasters, Twitter users seized the opportunity to make a name for themselves not only by reporting their and their communities’ news, but also by creating news, fake or otherwise, and helping spread other people’s news, the more provocative the better. Gaining a few or many Twitter followers as a result, seeing their Tweet retweeted many times and being debated or commented on was the Internet version of being the most popular kid at a sleepover. Their tweet or retweet becoming “viral” was the equivalent of being the high-school’s coolest kid for a day.
In his book, Bilton traces the evolution of Twitter from asking the question “What are you doing?” to asking “What’s happening?” Twitter has become an important news source, its users often beating established media to breaking news. But Twitter users took it further by answering questions like “what’s your opinion about X?” and “what news can you make up?” It’s just that it wasn’t called “fake news” at the time. Bilton describes a 2009 meeting between Al Gore and two of Twitter’s founders in which Gore tried to convince them to pursue a merger of Twitter with his Current TV.
Bilton: “After the [presidential] debates had concluded, and Barack Obama had tweeted about winning the 2008 presidential election, Gore immediately saw how compelling the combination had been: people making fun of Sarah Palin in real time, debunking false statements by both candidates, rooting for their home team. “
Twitter was golden, a new and exciting platform to distribute news, a new pillar in the important foundation of democracy provided by the news media. This elevated status of what was launched as a personal news broadcasting medium was reinforced at the start of the so-called “Arab Spring” in 2011. Twitter was now perceived not only as a pillar of democracy in the United States but as one spreading democracy to the people clamoring for it in the Middle East, helping them topple tyrants. That turned out to be real “fake news.”
There is no reason to take measures to protect the public from fake news on Twitter (or Facebook) because there is no evidence of any causal relationships between mis-information or being nasty to Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton and the state of American democracy. As a matter of fact, there is strong evidence that there is no connection whatsoever.
After paying a visit to the United States, Charles Dickens described (in Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844) the newsboys greeting a ship in New York Harbor: “’Here’s this morning’s New York Stabber! Here’s the New York Family Spy! Here’s the New York Private Listener! … Here’s the full particulars of the patriotic loco-foco movement yesterday, in which the whigs were so chawed up, and the last Alabama gauging case … and all the Political, Commercial and Fashionable News. Here they are!’ … ‘It is in such enlightened means,’ said a voice almost in Martin’s ear, ‘that the bubbling passions of my country find a vent.’”
Somehow, American democracy survived the partisan, sensational, filter bubble-oriented, fake news-filled news media of the 19th century. It will survive Twitter, Facebook, and “objective” news reporters and broadcasters. Unless, of course, a significant majority of Americans will come to believe that independent thinking is so 19th century and that the news media, not they, bears the primary responsibility for ensuring they have “an accurate and politically balanced understanding of the news” (as 48% of Americans believe according to a 2018 Knight Foundation survey).